Calendar applications exist for a long time, especially in corporate Intranets. The most famous examples of calendar applications are Microsoft Outlook™ and IBM Lotus Notes/Domino™. A corporate user can set up a daily calendar, and prompt window will pop-up before a certain event (such as conference, meeting with clients, birthdays, or watching a performance, etc.) is about to happen, so that the user can attend that event on time. Such tools can even integrate with a corporate E-mail and conference system. However, for public Internet users (for example, tourist group, international/national conference attendee), there is no way to use such tools as they are only installed within corporate Intranets and not accessible for public domain users.
At the same time, web-based calendars, such as Google Calendar™, are developed for public users. A user can set up a calendar through a web browser, and a notification, which may take the form of pop-up window, reminder E-mail and/or short message, will be sent to the user before a certain event is about to happen. However, many of the current web-based calendars are only for individual users, and do not support team calendar well.
Besides, current calendar applications do not take user presence into consideration. If a user can not access his/her computer, pop-up window or E-mail will still be sent to the user, which results doubtlessly in resource waste as the user is not reminded.
Most importantly, with current calendar applications, for the team calendar, an administrator can not know whether a user (e.g. team member) has received a reminder successfully as there is no notification confirmation mechanism available.
Therefore, there exists a need for a team calendar which is not only suitable for public Internet users, but also for corporate Intranet users, which has the capability of “intelligently” determining the online state of a user (i.e. team member), and thereby immediately conveying a notification to the user through appropriate communication ways (pop-up window, short message, phone call, etc.), and which enables an administrator of the team calendar to master immediately whether team members have received the notification through a notification confirmation mechanism.